* James P. Hogan: Electricity Powers the Universe
Richard Moore
Lots of images in original article, illustrating the effects described
in the text.
rkm _____
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig9/hogan1.html
Electricity Powers the Universe
by James P. Hogan
Electricity is an immensely more powerful force than gravity, and
far more complex in the ways it interacts with matter. Yet modern
astronomy remains wedded to a belief in gravity as the dominant
mover and shaper of the universe, and seeks to explain new observations
in terms that conceptually go back hundreds of years. James Hogan
describes an emerging alternative theory that recognizes the important
role played by electricity on cosmic scales, offering explanations
based on principles that are well understood and demonstrable in
laboratories, without need of recourse to unobserved, untestable
physics or speculative mathematical abstractions.
Humans have a wonderful ability for creating visions of ways to
improve themselves, thereby making the world a better place; and
then, it seems, for losing track somewhere along the way of turning
the visions into reality.
Take the business of science, for instance. After several thousand
futile years of fighting wars over whose revealed truth was really
true, and attempts to impose truth by decree with the aid of rack
and thumbscrew or deduce it via rigorous logic from self-evident
premises that nobody could agree on, the idea finally emerged that
a better way of finding out about the way things are in the world
might be to stop fixating on how they ought to be, actually look
at what's out there, and accept what it's telling you, whether you
like it or not. It works pretty well with such questions as figuring
out why cannon balls and planets move the way they do, what heat
is, and other matters that can be decided beyond argument according
to whether your motor starts or not, or if your plane gets off the
ground all of which rapidly become engineering. But when it comes
to issues that aren't settled so easily the meaning and origin of
life; how the cosmos gets to be the way it is, and where it came
from:
areas where authority can still command and get away with it things
don't seem to have really changed that much. Powerful establishments
enjoying political favor and monopoly privileges in teaching and
promotion rigidify into orthodoxies defending their beliefs
tenaciously, with dissenting views being dismissed, ridiculed, and
marginalized, even when supported by what would appear to be
verifiable fact and simpler arguments. In possibly an ultimate of
ironies, in areas where hopes for science were at their highest,
instead of showing the openness to alternatives and readiness to
follow the evidence wherever it pointed that were supposed to
characterize the new way of understanding the world, much of what
we hear today seems to be taking on more the trappings of intolerant
religion protecting dogma and putting down heresy.
More than ninety-nine percent of the observed universe exists in
the form of matter known as plasma. In the atoms that make up the
planet we live on, equal amounts of positive and negative electric
charge are confined together and cancel each other out, resulting
in objects like rocks and cabbages that are neutral on balance and
hence "feel" only the force of gravity. Plasma, by contrast, consists,
fully or in part, of charged particles negative "electrons" and
positive "ions" (an atom missing one or more of its electrons) that
are separated, and hence respond to electric and magnetic forces.
The electric force between two charged particles, which can be
attractive or repulsive, is thirty-nine orders of magnitude stronger
than the gravitational attraction between them. That's a one followed
by 39 zeros. Such a number boggles the imagination. It is in the
order of a millionth of a millimeter compared to 10,000 times the
size of the known universe. Even in a plasma comprising just one
charged particle in 10,000 which would be typical of the interstellar
clouds of dust and gas from which stars are formed electromagnetic
forces will dominate gravity by a factor of ten million to one.
Yet, conceptually, the prevailing view of the cosmos remains
essentially rooted in the work of such names as Kepler, Newton, and
Laplace, whose laws describe a mechanical universe made up of neutral
bodies moving in a vacuum under the influence of gravity. And today's
reigning cosmological model, founded on general relativity, is
essentially a theory of geometry manifesting itself as gravity.
Gravity-based models were reasonable two hundred and more years
ago, when Newtonian dynamics was shown to predict precisely the
motions of the Solar System. The plasma that permeates interplanetary
space was unknown, along with its ability to organize spontaneously
into isolating sheaths that, under stable and tranquil conditions
like those prevailing in our locality at the present time, screen
planets from electrical forces. And not a lot was understood about
electricity in any case. But more recent advances in observational
astronomy have revealed phenomena that do not lend themselves readily
to explanation in familiar gravitational terms. Pulsars rapidly
varying stellar objects conventionally interpreted as spinning
neutron stars have now been measured to fluctuate at rates that
call into question even the power of postulated neutron matter to
hold together. Quasars, if accepted in accordance with the customary
reading of red-shift as being the most distant objects known, radiate
energy with intensities that defy explanation by any process involving
conventional matter. The way galaxies rotate, and their violent
ejections of matter jets, do not conform to expectations based on
gravity. To account for these and other anomalies, such speculative
devices as "dark matter" at the last count numbering seven different
varieties "dark energy," matter collapsing into black holes, and
similar exotic mechanisms that have never been observed are introduced
to make the theory fit the facts.
Seeking to explain new findings in familiar terms is natural and
represents a desirable economy of thought. Models that have become
standard were not lightly arrived at and should not lightly be cast
aside. However, as was seen with the ever-more elaborate systems
of epicycles contrived to keep the Ptolemaic system alive for long
after a change of thinking was called for, such conservatism can
be taken too far. There comes a point where, "We don't need another
theory, because the one we've got can be made to fit the data,"
is saying more about human inventive ingenuity than the accuracy
of the theory.
Over the last two hundred years an enormous amount has been learned
about electricity. Technology has gone from Faraday motors and
hand-cranked Wimhurst machines to super computers and satellite
communications. In parallel with these advances, electrical theorists
have developed an alternative paradigm for interpreting astronomical
observations, based on principles that are well understood and can
be demonstrated in any electrical or plasma laboratory. It requires
none of the esoteric physics or ad-hoc inventions that the mainstream
has had to resort to repeatedly when new observations failed to
match expectations, or were never anticipated at all, and it is
proving to be more powerful predictively. Proponents refer to it
as Electric Universe theory. Its basic premise is that what we're
seeing when we point telescopes at new stars being born or violently
energetic events deforming distant galaxies are not results of
gravity being intensified unimaginably and behaving in strange and
unheard of ways, but electricity. Where electrical forces are
operating, gravity effectively ceases to exist. A tiny magnet will
snap a nail up effortlessly against the gravitational pull of the
entire Earth. You don't have to keep your coffee pot below the wall
outlet to enable the electrons to fall down through the cord.
Around the turn of the nineteenth century, the Norwegian physicist
Kristian Birkeland studied the northern auroras and concluded that
they are caused by charged particles from the Sun being directed
to the polar regions by the Earth's magnetic field, where they
excite atoms of the upper atmosphere to light-emission energies.
This was not favorably received by the theoreticians of his day,
whose mathematical models treated the Earth as an isolated object
in space, and his work was largely ignored. Although satellite
measurements have since confirmed the existence of interplanetary
plasma and Earth's complex environment of fields, particles, and
currents, there is still an entrenched reluctance to accept them
as parts of electrical circuitry that not only connects the Earth
to the Sun, but spans the entire Solar System.
Recognition of space as pervaded by plasma, and hence able to conduct
electric currents, is what distinguishes the electrical model of
the universe. Electric currents create magnetic fields, which induce
secondary currents, which in turn produce their own fields. The
complex interplays of forces that result can give rise to amazingly
intricate structures and behaviors of matter.
Currents in plasma flow as elongated filaments, which can be visible
in instances like auroral displays and lightning, where energies
become high enough to initiate electrical discharge. Parallel
filaments are pulled together in an effect known as a "pinch," which
can be very powerful. At shorter ranges, however, the net force
between the filaments becomes repulsive rather than attractive,
causing them to rotate and twist around each other into a braided
structure as they approach, instead of merging. The braid can
interact with similar braids to form "ropes" on a larger scale,
which might then repeat the process.
Such braided structures are the signature of electric currents in
plasmas.
They have been shown to scale up through an astonishing fourteen
orders of magnitude. Effects produced on a microscopic scale in
laboratories can be observed unfolding at cosmological dimensions.
The standard model of star formation has stars condensing from an
accretion disk of dust and gas as it contracts under self-gravitation.
It has remained essentially unchanged for two hundred years despite
having a number of problems. For a start, simulations and calculation
indicate that peripheral matter in such a disk would disperse rather
than coalesce into planetary clumps. Then there's the question of
how the angular momentum the property that makes a flywheel want
to keep turning comes to be concentrated in the planets 98 percent
of it in the case of our Solar System. A contracting disk should
deliver most of its angular momentum to the central part, giving
the Sun a rotation period of something like 13 hours instead of the
28 days that it has. And further, where did it all came from to
begin with? Dispersed matter initially moving randomly should contain
very little net angular momentum. Finally, for a star the size of
the Sun, gravitational contraction won't produce a high enough
density at the core to generate the temperature necessary for
igniting the fusion reactions generally believed to be the power
source. To make it work, various quantum mechanical improbabilities
are wheeled in to allow things to happen that all the odds say
shouldn't.
Stars are concentrated along the spiral arms of galaxies, which is
also where new stars come into existence. The electric model proposes
the arms to be the paths of currents traversing the galactic disk,
and stars as the focal points of pinches occurring between them,
strung like beads on threads. Electrical forces offer a far more
effective means than gravity for gathering, compressing, and heating
dispersed material. And, from what was said earlier, rotation is
no longer an anomaly in need of explanation, but imparted naturally
as a result of the process. Here's an example of where you can see
it happening.
The Butterfly nebula. Embedded current cylinders converging and
producing plasma glow discharge over a distance greater than the
diameter of our Solar System. The close-up of the neck shows a dusty
toroid occluding the central star. The physics of plasmas predicts
such a torus.
On a larger scale, the same process explains galaxies. Electric
galaxies were first proposed by the Swedish Nobel laureate Hannes
Alfvin in the middle of the last century, who envisioned immense
rivers of electricity flowing through space, of intergalactic extent.
Sequence from a supercomputer simulation at Los Alamos National
Laboratories of the structure arising from a pinch between two
plasma currents. Above, a real galaxy for comparison.
Galaxies don't rotate in the way that predictions from gravity-based
cosmology say they should. With the amount of observed mass and the
velocities measured at the rim, they ought to be flying apart. The
solution of choice is to invoke "dark matter," never actually
observed, but which can be given just the right properties and put
in just the right places to produce the desired results. It has
been called "cosmic duct tape" capable of fixing anything. By
contrast, the electric model holds that, far from being isolated,
passive accumulations of mass revolving under their own momentum
after being spun up by some unexplained cause, galaxies are active
components in enormous cosmic power circuits. They're not flywheels,
but motors, driven by forces easily able to hold them together
without need of invisible glue. Inventing unobservables to hold up
failed predictions is usually the sign of a theory in trouble.
Galaxies are not distributed evenly through space, but concentrated
in strings and "walls" around voids that can be thousands of
light-years across.
According to the standard theory, structures of that size shouldn't
have had time to form in the 14 billion years since everything was
supposed to have started with the Big Bang. But it's what would be
expected if galaxies result from cosmic electric currents, because
currents flow in filaments and sheets of filaments the veils of
the polar auroras, for example. The cosmology developed by Alfvin
and his intellectual descendants proposes an earlier plasma epoch
in the evolution of the cosmos, in which electromagnetic forces
played the initial role of collecting matter together to create the
densities that enabled gravity to become a significant factor only
later, making the 14 billion years no longer an issue.
Many galaxies are found to be shooting out enormous jets of matter
and energy in the direction of their axes, often on scales that
dwarf the galaxy itself.
The rotating system of currents converging on the axis, along with
its associated magnetic fields, stores enormous amounts of energy.
Releases due to instabilities or the need to shed excess from an
accumulating buildup would manifest themselves in just this kind
of way.
Radio Galaxy 1313-192. Jets emitted by the visible galaxy power the
x-ray emitting lobes. Such lobes were predicted by Hannes Alfvin
long before radio sources were discovered.
A gravitational explanation of such energies requires postulating
black holes to concentrate to almost infinite density the weakest
force known to physics, and the creation of jets through unclear
processes involving acceleration and mechanical collisions in
accretion disks of matter spiraling into them.
Despite widely repeated claims to the contrary, black holes have
never been observed. What is observed are enormously energetic
events occurring in space.
Attributing them to black holes is part of the assumed basis for
interpretation. The way engineers and researchers produce x-rays
is by accelerating charged particles with electric fields. Your
dentist doesn't do it by banging rocks together.
Jet emerging from galaxy M87 extends for thousands of light-years.
Electrical structures remain coherent over such distances, whereas
neutral gas would rapidly disperse. The glow is consistent with
electrically accelerated electrons spiraling along magnetic field
lines.
The term "plasma" was co-opted from biology in recognition of the
eerily lifelike forms and changes observed in electrical discharge
experiments with ionized gases. Besides forming filaments, braids,
sheets, and isolating layers, plasmas will organize into cellular
structures bounding regions possessing different properties such
as temperature, density, and chemistry.
The Cat's Eye nebula shows the kind of complexity that can result.
And this is the core region, with the star at its center.
So what are we seeing? Gravity, which produces formless coagulations
of matter like clots in cream? Or electricity?
Some suggested web sites for further information on the Electric
Universe:
* www.holoscience.com<http://www.holoscience.com/> *
[cid:0602912A-5DC5-4329-9A82-59E7AAF15894@vodafone]
www.thunderbolts.info<http://www.thunderbolts.info/> *
www.plasmaresources.com<http://www.plasmaresources.com/> *
http://public.lanl.gov/alp/plasma/TheUniverse.html *
http://www.electric-cosmos.org<http://www.electric-cosmos.org/>
July 30, 2008
James P. Hogan [send him mail<mailto:ja...@jamesphogan.com>], a
former digital systems engineer and computer sales executive, has
been a full-time writer since 1980. He was born in London, moved
to the USA for many years, and now lives in the Republic of Ireland.
His web site is at www.jamesphogan.com.<http://www.jamesphogan.com/>
Copyright ) 2008 LewRockwell.com
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